4.7 MySQL Program Development Utilities

This section describes some utilities that you may find useful when
developing MySQL programs.

In shell scripts, you can use the
my_print_defaults program to parse option files
and see what options would be used by a given program. The following
example shows the output that my_print_defaults
might produce when asked to show the options found in the
[client] and [mysql] groups:

Note for developers: Option file handling is implemented in the C
client library simply by processing all options in the appropriate
group or groups before any command-line arguments. This works well
for programs that use the last instance of an option that is
specified multiple times. If you have a C or C++ program that
handles multiply specified options this way but that doesn't read
option files, you need add only two lines to give it that
capability. Check the source code of any of the standard MySQL
clients to see how to do this.

Several other language interfaces to MySQL are based on the C client
library, and some of them provide a way to access option file
contents. These include Perl and Python. For details, see the
documentation for your preferred interface.